Ridley Scott (the director of Blade Runner, Alien, and, uh, Prometheus) announced he’ll be executive producing 12 sci-fi short films with Machinima. The most successful of these films may be developed as feature films. The directors of these 12 shorts will be picked from the over 80 filmmakers in Ridley Scott Associates. That group includes Kathryn Bigelow, Martin Scorsese, Sam Mendes, and Neill Blomkamp, although we’re betting the directors of these shorts will be less known. RSA is approaching their filmmakers to ask if any of them have a sci-fi concept they’ve been wanting to develop.

Machinima, for their part, has the top-rated entertainment channel on YouTube with 2.6 billion views per month. They’ve already moved a project from webseries to feature films. We’re speaking, of course, about their Mortal Kombat: Legacy. It started as a viral video, became a webseries (now in its second season), and is currently in development as a feature film. Machinima chief executive Allen DeBevoise said he believes “new sci-fi franchises will be born” from the partnership. Sounds sticky.

Okay, this could be cool. But if any of these short films involve traveling to a distant planet then immediately removing your helmets and touching black alien goo, we’re jumping into the power loader and ejecting this whole thing into space.